The Final Meetings at the Jordan

The close of the Life of St. Mary of Egypt: the second meeting, a year after the first, when Zosimas brings the Eucharist to the Jordan bank and Mary walks across the water to receive it — the Life’s eucharistic climax; her request to be sought again the following year; and the third meeting, when Zosimas finds her body and the inscription in the sand, the dating crux the Life itself plants, and the lion who digs the grave. This file reports the narrative as the Life tells it, including its own claim to oral transmission through Sophronius.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Frame of the Three Meetings

The Life structures its ending around three encounters between Mary and the priest-monk Zosimas of a Palestinian monastery near the Jordan, who each Great Lent crossed into the wilderness as was his community’s custom. The first meeting is the long conversation in which Mary recounts her life and her forty-seven desert years (see The Forty-Seven Years). The second and third — a year and two years later — bring the Life to its climax and close. As with the desert account, what follows is what the Life narrates (Kouli, in Holy Women of Byzantium, ed. Talbot, Dumbarton Oaks, 1996), reported under the discipline of METHODOLOGY §3.5: the miracle accounts are given as the source attests them, with the source named, not asserted as documented history.

The Second Meeting: Communion on the Jordan

At the close of the first meeting Mary makes a precise request. She asks Zosimas not to seek her again that year but, on Great and Holy Thursday of the next, to bring her the Eucharist to the near bank of the Jordan: “place the Life-Creating Body and Blood of Christ … bring it to me … to the bank of the Jordan that adjoins the inhabited region” (Kouli §28). She had told him she had not communed since the night she left the world, and her one desire is to receive the Mysteries before she dies.

A year later Zosimas does as she asked. Detained by illness, he comes in the evening of Holy Thursday with the consecrated Gifts and waits on the inhabited bank. Mary appears on the far side, in the deep dusk, and here the Life sets its central miracle. She makes the sign of the Cross over the river and crosses it on foot: “she made the sign of the Cross over the waters of the Jordan … and then she at once stepped on to the waters and began walking across the surface towards him” (Life of Mary of Egypt; cf. Kouli §29). Zosimas, who had been about to throw himself at her feet, is forbidden — she will not let a priest, a bearer of the Mysteries, bow to her.

Then comes the eucharistic climax the whole Life has been building toward. Having confessed and received the Body and Blood of Christ, Mary lifts her hands and eyes to heaven and prays in the words of St. Symeon the God-receiver: “Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, O Lord, according to Thy word; for my eyes have seen Thy salvation” (Life of Mary of Egypt, quoting Luke 2:29–30; cf. Kouli §30). The Nunc Dimittis is exact and deliberate: like Symeon in the Temple, Mary has received the One she waited for and is ready to die. The communion is presented as the consummation of the desert years — the long purgation finds its end not in her own perfection but in the reception of Christ. She then asks Zosimas to come, one year hence, to the place of their first meeting, and she recrosses the Jordan as she came.

The Third Meeting: The Body and the Inscription

A year later — the third Lent — Zosimas returns to the spot of the first conversation and finds Mary’s body lying on the ground, hands folded, face to the East. Beside or beneath the head is an inscription traced in the sand, and the Life makes a point of it: this is the woman who told him she had never learned letters, yet here is writing in her hand, a final sign of the infused knowledge the Life had earlier claimed for her (see The Forty-Seven Years). The text reads: “Abba Zosima, bury on this spot the body of humble Mary. Return to dust that which is dust and pray to the Lord for me, who departed in the month of Fermoutin of Egypt, called April by the Romans, on the first day, on the very night of our Lord’s Passion, after having partaken of the Divine Mysteries” (Life of Mary of Egypt; cf. Kouli §33).

The Dating Crux the Life Plants

The inscription contains a deliberate chronological puzzle, and the Life plants it rather than hides it. Mary “departed … on the very night of our Lord’s Passion, after having partaken of the Divine Mysteries” — that is, she died the same Holy Thursday night on which Zosimas had brought her communion, a full year before he found her body. Yet the place of her death is the site of the first meeting, a long journey inland from the riverbank where she communed. The narrative thus implies two miracles at once: that she did not decay across a whole year, and that her incorrupt body was transported — carried, the Life and its readers infer, by the power of God — from the bank where she received the Mysteries to the inland spot where Zosimas would find her (the temporal-spatial impossibility is intrinsic to the text, not a copyist’s slip; it is noted as such in the scholarship and in modern summaries of the Life). The Life offers no naturalistic resolution; the impossibility is the point, a final seal of the wholly grace-borne character of her end. This compendium reports the crux as the Life states it and does not attempt to harmonize it (METHODOLOGY §3.5; see Source Criticism).

The Lion

Zosimas, aged and alone, has no tool and no strength to dig a grave in the hard ground. As he weeps, a lion approaches. He fears it at first, but the beast is gentle, and at the old man’s word it sets to work: “the lion with his front paws began to dig a hole deep enough to bury the body” (Life of Mary of Egypt; cf. Kouli §35). Together they bury her, the lion departs into the desert “like a lamb,” and Zosimas returns to his monastery. The detail belongs to a recognizable hagiographic motif — the wild beast that serves the saint, as in Jerome’s Life of Paul the Hermit, where lions dig the grave of the first hermit, a text the Mary tradition demonstrably draws on (see Source Criticism). Within the Life its meaning is the restoration of Eden: the saint’s holiness reconciles even the wild creation, so that the desert beast does the work of love at her burial.

The Release of the Story and the Claim of Transmission

The Life closes by accounting for its own existence, and this self-witness is significant for how it must be read. Zosimas, the text says, told no one in his lifetime — or told only what was needful — and the monks of his community handed the story down by word of mouth: they “passed on the life of Saint Mary of Egypt by word of mouth without writing it down” (Life of Mary of Egypt; cf. Kouli, conclusion). The narrator then presents himself as one who has set down in writing what he received from this oral chain — “[I] wrote down the Life of Saint Mary of Egypt as I heard it from the holy Fathers” — the device by which the Life is attached to the name of Sophronius of Jerusalem.

This closing claim is the Life’s own account of its sources: a single eyewitness (Zosimas), a community that preserved his memory orally, and a writer at the end of the chain. The named-witness-and-oral-transmission device is a convention of the genre as much as a historical report, and it is precisely the seam the source critic must examine — what such a claim can and cannot bear is the subject of the next file (see Source Criticism). Reported as the Life gives it, the ending releases Mary’s story from the silence of the desert into the memory of the Church, where it has remained as one of the great images of repentance.

The placement of the device is itself instructive. By insisting that the story was kept secret in Zosimas’ lifetime and transmitted only orally afterward, the Life accounts for the very thing a skeptic would press — the absence of any contemporary written record — and turns that absence into a feature of the narrative rather than an objection to it. This is a recurring move in the vitae of solitaries, whose hiddenness is part of their sanctity and whose stories, by the logic of the genre, should surface late and by word of mouth. The honest reader holds both truths at once: the device gives the Life its frame of authenticity, and the device is a frame. Which is why the discovery of the body, the inscription, and the lion are reported here strictly as the Life narrates them, with their weight as evidence deferred to the source-critical treatment that follows.

References

The Life of Mary of Egypt, attributed to Sophronius of Jerusalem (BHG 1042). Trans. Maria Kouli, in Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation, ed. Alice-Mary Talbot, 65–93. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1996. (The three meetings, the Jordan communion, the inscription, and the lion; section numbers follow Kouli’s translation.)
The Life of Our Venerable Mother Mary of Egypt (devotional English text). stmaryofegypt.org/files/library/life.htm; cross-checked against Orthodox Church in America, oca.org/saints/lives. (Source of the verbatim walking-on-water passage, the Nunc Dimittis at communion, and the full text of the inscription as rendered in the received English version.)
Scripture: Luke 2:29–30 (the Nunc Dimittis Mary prays after communing).
Jerome, Vita Pauli (Life of Paul the First Hermit), for the beast-helper motif (lions digging the hermit’s grave) on which the Mary tradition draws — discussed further in Source Criticism.